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North Philadelphia ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT EMILY T. COOPERMAN, PH.D. Introduction The North Philadelphia Planning District is a zone that, in contrast to other portions of what is now the city, had no historic early concentration of population analogous to the growth in Frankford or Germantown before the nineteenth century, and it was not marked by settlement before the establishment of the Pennsylvania Colony at the end of the seventeenth century. The territory of the district was relatively remote from settlements and village developments in Germantown, Frankford, Center City, and along the Delaware, and there was no easy access to this river for the transportation of people and goods. The two historic inland waterways in the Planning District, Wingohocking and Penn creeks, were not the focus of significant amounts of early industrial use because of this relative remoteness and the fact that they were the upper limits of their watersheds and therefore provided relatively low potential power. The land of the Planning District lay in what were two townships within Philadelphia County. Most of the district was located in the Northern Liberties lands, whose northern limit was roughly at Wingohocking Street. A smaller portion of the district, the roughly triangular segment loosely bounded by Roosevelt Boulevard, Wingohocking Street, and Frankford Creek, lay in Bristol Township. In 1808, Penn Township was divided from Northern Liberties, with Germantown Avenue as the boundary, indicating growth between this road and the Schuylkill River. The development of the Planning District began, as did most of the area of Philadelphia County, as country seats. Its early development was informed both by the fact that it was outside the original city but also by the fact that it was a place that lay between this early settlement and those at Frankford and Germantown. Thus, early roads, which were the first spines of development, gave way to the area’s first railroads, which connected not just these disparate locations in Philadelphia County, but also linked the city with key places further north and inland. The course of the future of the district was set by these railroads, and by the fact that it remained largely open into the third quarter of the nineteenth century. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industry had begun to infiltrate the district, and would continue to be developed there even into the mid-twentieth century. Geographical Summary The North Philadelphia Planning District (figure 1) takes up much of the area of the city where it widens north of Center City, and south of the point where the city branches to the northwest and northeast toward Germantown and Roxborough on the one hand and toward the Far Northeast on the other. The North Planning District is bounded on the west by the Schuylkill River, and Frankford Creek on the northeast, but does not span to the Delaware River on the east NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT HISTORIC CONTEXT – PAGE 1 ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 beyond Kensington Avenue. The district is characterized by relatively flat topography, with the notable exception of the steep Schuylkill River banks on the western edge of the district, the less steep banks of the Frankford Creek on the northeast (figure 2), and the relatively steep drop at the Roosevelt Boulevard that is partly manmade, and partly corresponding to the former bed of Falls Run. The Planning District is bounded on the south and southeast by Lehigh Avenue and Kensington Avenue, respectively, and by the Roosevelt Boulevard and Wingohocking Avenue on the north and northwest. Historically three streams were located in the district, all of which have been culverted. The first of these was Penn Brook, which ran into Gunner’s Run, crossed the district, flowing west to east at around Westmoreland Street, originating just west of Germantown Avenue. Near the northern edge of the district, Wingohocking Creek also flowed west to east, beginning in the lower portion of Germantown and joining Frankford Creek at the end of Ramona Avenue today. At the far northwestern edge of the district, Falls Run ran roughly east-west into the Schuylkill River through the southern part of what is now known as East Falls. Like the land in the original city, however, the alluvial plain soils of the district historically contained sufficient clay to provide bricks for construction in addition to the trees that were felled in the area. Figure 1. North Philadelphia Planning District, outlined in black. NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT HISTORIC CONTEXT – PAGE 2 ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 Figure 2. Composite, USGS topographical maps, 2011, North Philadelphia Planning District outlined in black. First Period of Development: Country Estates and Crossroads Clusters: 1710s through the 1820s. In contrast to portions of the city along the Schuylkill and the Delaware rivers, the area of the North Planning District was not a locus of European settlement before the advent of the Pennsylvania Colony. Instead, this portion of Philadelphia County became one characterized by two principal land uses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As an area between the main village settlements of Frankford and Germantown and the original city along the Delaware, it became a region in which estates of varying size were concentrated, and one in which a network of roads connected these areas of settlement to each other and to the Schuylkill River. This “betweenity” is easily seen in Thomas Holme’s 1687 map of the Pennsylvania Colony (figure 3). Both of these patterns are best documented in the eighteenth century by the famous Scull and Heap map (figure 4), which shows these roads, the historic creeks, and the estates that had been formed by the middle of the eighteenth century in this region. While these roads connected portions of the region, they were of insufficient quality to move goods manufactured by mills along the creeks in the waterways in the district, and the relatively inland nature and flat topography of the district were not conducive to a significant amount of water power on which to place these mills. A saw mill located at the mouth of Falls Run and one near the northern edge of the district are the only two shown by Scull and Heap. NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT HISTORIC CONTEXT – PAGE 3 ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 Figure 2: Detail, Thomas Holme’s 1687 Map of the Improved Part of Pennsylvania, showing the Northern Liberties between Frankford, Germantown, and the original city. NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT HISTORIC CONTEXT – PAGE 4 ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 Figure 3: Detail, Nicholas Scull and George Heap, A Map of Philadelphia and Parts Adjacent, 1752. Fairhill is at center bottom at “Norris” with Fairhill Quaker meeting above it. Stenton is at top left of center. The largest, the first, and arguably the best known of these estates was Fairhill, developed by Isaac Norris. The property was named for the Quaker Meeting house that was established on or near the “fair hill” that was a higher piece of ground than its surroundings, and, more particularly, higher than ground to the south and east, and therefore afforded a view of the settlements in the city and along the Delaware. The meeting itself had been built about 1707, on a lot that was given by William Penn to Quaker theologian George Fox’s estate in 1703 in lieu of acreage he had promised Fox in Pennsylvania. Fox’s estate’s lot was given to the Society of Friends for a house of worship. With respect to the donation of the lot to Fox, Penn wrote to his proprietary representative, James Logan, and June of that year, noting that he would “willingly allow a field of twenty acres, or twenty- five acres for Friends’ use, out of liberty lands, near any meeting; but to allow it out of the city lots is what I will never do, unless I was on the spot”: Penn resented the use of a “High” (Market) Street lot which he had “reserved for Tishe,” which had been taken for a meeting house (presumably the one at 2nd Street).1 Thus, the Fairhill meeting house was established in the Northern Liberties on the “Germantown Road” (Germantown Avenue) – the main thoroughfare between the city settlement along the Delaware and the Germantown village to its northwest. In the 1870s, antiquarian Thompson Westcott recorded the building, which still stood at that point, as “twenty-five feet in length by fifteen in depth, and is built of red and black bricks, with the black bricks on the rear side arranged in lozenge shapes [i.e., diaper work].” The interior was noted as “one room, rising to the pitched roof, the timbers of which are painted red,” and that there was “a small gallery on each side – one for men, the other for women.” During the eighteenth century the property included a small burying ground; a larger cemetery was created later (see below).2 The ca. 1707 Fairhill Meeting House was one of the most substantial early houses of worship in Philadelphia County, preceding 1 Correspondence between William Penn and James Logan Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Printed by J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1870), p. 212. 2 Thompson Westcott, The Historic Mansions and Buildings of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1877), pp. 491-493. NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT HISTORIC CONTEXT – PAGE 5 ARCHITECTURAL RESEARCH AND CULTURAL HISTORY HISTORIC PRESERVATION CONSULTING HISTORIC CONTEXT STATEMENT FOR NORTH PLANNING DISTRICT 2012 the earliest portion of the brick building of Trinity Church, Oxford (see Historic Context Statement for the Lower Northeast Planning District) by about five years.
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